Tokyo Getting World's First 3D-Printing Photo Booth

In the 1870s you needed to be a big shot to have your portrait taken, and in the 1970s you needed to star in something made by 20th Century Fox to have an action figure of yourself. But here in 2012, technology has advanced to combine those things for the average consumer.

On November 24th, Eye of Gyre, an art exhibition space in Tokyo's Harajuku neighborhood, is pulling the sheets off of their 3D Shashin-kan. Literally translated as "3D Picture Space," it's what they're calling the world's first 3D-printing photo booth. Visitors can have their "portraits" taken in the form of whole-body scanning, and end up with a detailed figurine of them in 10-, 15- or 20-centimeter heights, depending on how much they'd like to pay.

Instant gratification this ain't, as the figurines will take a month or more for fulfillment and delivery. (We're guessing that they need to clean up the scan, and that an artisan paints the colors on after printing.) There's also a capturing restriction similar to when daguerrotypes were first developed: The subject must remain completely still during the scanning process, which is six minutes in this case, meaning Fido-san and small children are not ideal capture subjects. Beyond that, reflective clothes, wire-rim eyeglasses, hoop earings, fine patterns, and fur are all no-nos, because these either muck with the scanning process or are impossible to faithfully reproduce under their system.

Visitors will need to sign up in advance here, but you'd better hurry: The exhibition closes on January 14th, and the slots are filling up quickly.

3 Comments

We are producing TIM (This Is Me) since early this year and we can scan in 3 seconds the whole body and deliever the finished figurine within 3 to 5 days. For more information visit www.tim-me.com and look out for TIMbust aand TIMpic that will be shortly availabel.

I saw something exactly like this in Madrid last summer. It took me a minute, but I found their site:
http://www.3d-u.es/
From the video, it appears that the scanning process is much faster than six minutes (more like six seconds). All it's doing is taking photos from different angles (while zebra stripes are projected on the subjects). The program can convert the zebra-striped subject's contours into 3D data and then use traditional images taken at the same time to map on surface data.

It's only now that I'm starting to see the real, human impact of 3D printing, and it's not iPhone cases or replacement dishwasher parts or faster prototypes. This solution is far more powerful than that. Albert Manero runs the #CollectiveProject, whose Limbitless 3D program marshals his fellow University of Central

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